


The Stains You Leave Behind

by NebulousNids



Category: Thirteen Storeys - Jonathan Sims
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Gen, Hurt, Jésus Candido, Pain, Suffering, Violet Ng, canon-typical capitalism, i have no idea how to tag this, the shadows are sentient
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-22
Updated: 2021-02-22
Packaged: 2021-03-12 17:08:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29637879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NebulousNids/pseuds/NebulousNids
Summary: Everyone leaves a stain on the world.Everyone casts a shadow that darkens the land beneath their feet.Tobias Fell, in particular, has left many.And they are in agony.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	The Stains You Leave Behind

Everyone leaves a stain on the world.

You see the old woman struggling to shovel the heavy snow that coats her driveway and turn away, deigning instead to clear the ice off of your own. You could go help her, it wouldn't be that difficult. But it's cold and you choose to turn back inside.

Normally the stains take care of themselves.

You make yourself a mug of tea, you sit down on the couch with a blanket to warm up from the biting cold.

You wince as you spill the tea over yourself, the burning liquid seeping through your clothes, leaving your skin a faint, blistering red.

However, in the case of one Tobias Fell, the stains are heavy. Heavier than the normal strings of karma, of fate, twitched so subtly by the universe, stains so small you hardly notice them. Tobias’s stains, rather, are a dark, inky shadow cast over the thousands of people he’s hurt. They weigh down the air like a plague, yearning to reach Tobias and give him what he deserves, thus freeing them from existence.

It is painful to exist as a shadow, as the physical manifestation of pain, however slight.

The pain is alleviated when the shadow balances out the hurt, causing an equal and opposite amount to happen to the sinner. Newton’s third law doesn't only apply to physics.

Tobias thought knew how the shadows worked, and he knew that his were spread wide, reaching into every corner of the earth, darkening the hundred of acres of land he owned and stole and ruined.

He wanted to be rid of his.

An equal and opposite reaction of the terror he’s wrought would end horribly for him, he knew that.

So he came up with a plan to get rid of his shadows, his stains, his sins and transgressions, and wrongdoings.

He took each sin, each shadow, all the hurt he’d cast upon the land, and created a warped, twisted building the reached up into the clouded sky from them.

Banyan Court, he called it, named after the tree. A fitting comparison, for the building’s roots sunk deep into the ground, and the branches reached far upwards into the sky, a beacon of pain rooted in suffering. The tree of immortality, that was said to grant wishes and longevity, the building that Tobias was using to evade his own early death from all the pain he’d caused.

Funded by the workers who he trapped in torturous minimum wage jobs, who barely made enough money to survive. By the companies who let children starve, who shot the unions down. Who poisoned the air, poisoned the world, causing so many to fall ill, all of them refused the medicines Tobias could easily distribute. Funded by the gemstones he sacrificed lives for and then sold for thousands more than their worth.

Each individual brick packed with the bones of those who had died from neglected safety protocol. The building did not stand on a graveyard, it didn't need to, the number of lives that he poured into it's construction forced it's very walls to contain more than enough death. Banyan Court was its own graveyard.

The “affordable” living spaces, taking his employees who he knew could afford nothing more, and forcing them into rooms with every corner cut. They were trapped in dangerous housing, unable to leave, unable to afford anywhere else, and kicked out if they dared speak up.

Banyan Court was rooted in pain and misery and suffering and death.

Tobias Fell’s shadows were tied to it.

He pinned them down, bound each individual stain to the rest, trapping them in the confines of his horrid building.

He intended for his shadows to be on a leash of sorts, to be unable to reach him in his penthouse, and thus forced to inflict the punishment intended for him onto the residents living inside the same walls that the shadows were trapped in.

///

Agony lanced through the shadows staining Banyan Court.

It hurt.

They were trapped they couldn't  _ move _ and it  _ hurt _ .

A girl walked through the building, making her way to her flat after a long, thankless night at work.

They could feel each step she took and it was  _ painful _ .

They could hear and feel  _ everything _ that was happening and it was  _ loud _ and  _ bright _ and all the pain of Tobias’s  _ victims _ caused the shadows to grow in size and they strained against the chains binding them down, digging into them, and it  _ hurt _ . They could not break free, only suffer in a space far too small to hold them.    
Each step the girl placed on the ground sent tendrils of  _ hurt _ spiraling into the building and the shadows desperately, without thinking pushed them back towards her and they didn't want to hurt her they didn't, they didn't want to cause any more pain but they couldn't think for all the throbbing agony clouding their  _ existence _ .

Terrified of hurting her but desperately wanting the torment to stop they reached out.

She didn't see them.

But as they slowly let themself pour into her, Violet found herself uncovering dark secrets about Tobias.

They didn't want to hurt her. She just might be able to hurt Tobias for them. She wasn't trapped. She wasn't bound. If they showed her what Tobias was she might be able to take some of the stains and carry them to Tobias and then they could hurt Tobias through her and it wouldn't hurt them as much and the torture would lessen and he might even die and the new pain would stop flooding in.

The spikes of agony didn't hurt as bad when she held them.

Of course, they had manifested before, but they’d always done so carefully. One controlled stain seeping into a person’s bag of chips, taking the pain of burning meant for Tobias and softening it into making the snack spicier.

Even the slightest bit of niceness made it hurt just barely less. It didn't lessen the weight of the shadows, they wouldn't be able to dissipate until Tobias received his end of the suffering he caused, but it made it hurt slightly less.

Now they just hoped Violet might be able to help them.

///

A cane pressed into the carpet of one of the nicer flats.

The shadows writhed beneath it.

A man leaned forwards onto it and they thrashed and twisted as though a knife were being driven into them (elsewhere in the building someone stabbed a knife into a table to emphasize a point, darts were hurled into the wall, countless nails pressed into them, stabbing and twisting and  _ hurting _ . The cane was duller, less sharp, but pressing down on an open, bleeding wound just makes it hurt more). 

They had no voice to cry out with, no way of pleading for him to  _ stop _ because it  _ hurt _ and all they could do to lash out was to give him shadows.

They didn't even care if it worked how they wanted it to, if they might succeed in alleviating some of the pain through having him hurt Tobias. The shadows couldn't even cry to release the tension from how much agony each footstep lanced through them so they just reached out for someone, _ anyone _ to take a small piece of the burden.

They felt horrible.

Jésus suffered for them, he clawed at their walls and the spikes of pain came with tremors of guilt.

They didn't want anyone else to hurt they didn't want to hurt him.

They would have pulled back were it not for the invitation pressed into his pocket.

This had a chance of working.

If it worked they would stop hurting him because they would be in less pain and they would be coherent enough to keep him safe.

To keep everyone hurt by Tobias safe.

They just wanted the pain to end and the pain was everything caused by Tobias and they felt  _ all _ of it and they just wanted it to  _ end _ .

If it failed they would pull back.

///

If they wanted people to be able to hurt Tobias for them if they wanted all the pain to  _ stop _ they would need more than two people. 

They could give all the shadows to just one person in theory, but Violet and Jésus were struggling enough beneath the weight of the few each had been given.

They didn't want anyone to suffer.

They weren't cruel, or at least they desperately hoped they weren't.

They would give someone some stains, pour shadows into them until they couldn't bear anymore and then they would give the rest to the next person. 

Carter, Anna, Alvita, Caroline, Laura, Leon, Jason, Janek, and Damian all soon were bearing shadows of their own.

They were still in mind-numbing agony, but it was bearable.

Now the poor people just needed to reach Tobias and it would all  _ finally _ be over.

And Tobias was inviting them right up to his penthouse.

The pain and anger and hurt and fear that Tobias had caused rushed over him and he was dead and the shadows dissipated, finally,  _ finally, _ free from the chains he’d bound them in.

The agony Tobias Fell had caused, dead along with him.

He was dead and the stains he had left behind were free.

  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Tumblr: @nebulousnids16


End file.
